Previously, iPod would only play digitally protected songs that carry restrictions and were purchased from Apple's own iTunes music store.
The article is full of shit. iPods will play WAV, AIFF, MP3, and unprotected AAC. In fact, that's all the played for the few years before the ITunes Music Store came into business. CNN is just plain wrong, and they're making it sound like Real did Apple a favor.
It certainly doesn't infringe on My Rights Online. He probably wasn't watching an illegal copy of the movie. He probably wasn't watching on a region-free player. He almost certainly wasn't coding DeCSS while driving. I don't get what this has to do with my rights online?
Or with my rights at all for that matter. I don't have a right to not pay attention to the road. I don't have a right to be distracted while driving. And I certainly don't have a right to any form of entertainment I choose while driving?
He was distracted in his car and crossed the double yellow line. End of story.
Unlike the food example, where bad food could kill you, a computer virus in your home machine won't,
Until it's used as a bot to distribute kiddie porn, and the FBI comes and knocks on your door and they throw you in jail for 50 years. Yes, yes, death is irreversible, whereas you can always get acquitted later, but it comes pretty darn close to ruining your life.
The GPL is the most common free/open source software licence around, so coming up with a new incompatible licence for your software is a barrier to your software being adopted.
My point exactly. No one uses PHP, and all because of this license. If only they used the GPL, they might get some users, and get some O'Reilly books written about them and...
*whispering off camera*
Oh.
Seriously, the biggest reason I don't use PHP is because I learned Perl first, and PHP still feels like a kludge. But other people love it because it's easy. Seems to me that these are deciding factors, not licensing.
And this is old news. Those of us in Boston have been dealing with the implications of this for months now. From cameras, to random "Papers, please!" ID checks on the subway, or not carrying anything larger than a loaf of bread on the Orange Line during the convention, to closing an entire Interstate highway from 4PM until late in the evening for an entire week.
Nothing special about these cameras. There's no face recognition software, there's no "do not walk on sidewalk" list. Nothing to see here folks.
As horrible as it is to think, I wonder if some sort of legislation (governmental, ICANN, or otherwise) is necessary to keep these systems fair.
I recently had Comcast shut down my port 25 access due to spam reports. Of course, they refused to tell me who reported me or what they reported, so even giving them logs of my outgoing port 25 access from a sniffer isn't enough for them to remove the mark from my record.
And for starters, we could use some legislation requiring cable companies to treat all customers equally, regardless of how much they're paying. If you have a business account for cable modem service, they'll forward you reports of spam or other abuses (ie: port scanning from your machine), and they'll bend over backwards to help you, and if you say "there is no way this is my machine", they'll actually accept it on the first try and push the complainant to give more details or more proof.
(yes, I know legislation for that will never work, but it's most unfortunate that end users can get screwed more easily just because they're paying less. I mean, the power company won't ignore your report of a blackout just because you don't keep your lights and A/C on 24 hours a day)
Not anymore. *insert joke about server being hosted via wireless link* *insert joke about african vs european swallows and their airspeed velocity using IP over avian carrier*
We even use it on the Macs, which came with... Mail.app? iMail.app? whatever... We use it on the Macs, because it just does IMAP better. It still amazes me how poorly most email clients handle IMAP.
You're kidding, right? At least for 0.5 and 0.6, Thunderbird had serious IMAP/SSL bugs, where it would just hang for no apparent reason. The release notes acknowledge this bug, even. This caused a problem not just with delays in INBOX operations, but also manifested itself as a problmem with sending. If you chose to save sent mail on the server, and clicked Send, and it sent the mail, and then hung trying to write it to the server, it would respond with "mail was not sent" when it clearly was, it just hadn't copied it. Even the old Netscape 4.x was able to say "Sending the mail was successful, but copying it to your Sent folder failed". I never understand why Mozilla/Thunderbird couldn't do that.
I haven't compared against 0.7 yet, but last I checked Mail.app was an exceptionally good IMAP client, and even pine was better than Thunderbird at IMAP/SSL.
What makes Gmail incredible and revolutionary is the search features, the amazing interface, the threading, the labeling, and the tried and true "google minimalism."
Getting 1000mB's of space is just a side effect, that's there because gmail makes it desirable to archive multiple entire mailing lists.
Yahoo, once upon a time, was also search engine. (Yes, yes, it was called the Yahoo directory, but it did eventually do crawling) And a pretty good one, too. (I'm talking back when it was still a Stanford project, like another search engine) It's not inconceivable they had a project like this on the back burner that's getting ramped up to compete with Google. Granted, I don't think they have a chance, just because of the way Google works, their strong desire for simplicity, and the desire to keep the ads out of the search results.
What's most notable, however, is that Yahoo is doing this right now. And we don't even have a firm release date for Gmail. It's still in beta. If Yahoo is already scared of a beta service, that's saying something.
The print server doesn't make sense to me, I don't want a printer by my stereo.
I get the feeling Apple designed it as a wireless AP that can serve audio or share a USB printer, whichever the users want, rather than as a device for people who have a printer next to their stereo.
The thing with varying the framerate to introduce distortions sounds cool
No, it sounds terrible. Like those CDs that had high-pitched audio to prevent copying, and ended up eating people's speakers.
They claim they got the inspiration by noticing that computer monitors and TVs film poorly and have lines progressing down the screen (because the camera is filming faster than the screen can refresh, and is catching it in mid-frame. The image on your screen is being redrawn 60-85 times per second, depending on what your refresh rate is.) Except I know several people who experience physical pain given a low-enough refresh rate. Even 60-65 Hz can make them cringe. If they're introducing artifacts at regular intervals into a movie, I could easily imagine this affecting a whole bunch of people who would then be unable to attend movies. That would be poor. (Though pissing off your audience seems to work for the RIAA, so who knows?)
Really, it would be a lot less effort to start smaller. All pre-release copies of a movie (maybe even all prints, but then 1-to-1 mappings become harder) should get their own watermark. Something small, that's only in a few frames, like a cue dot. Barely noticeable unless you're looking for it. And then when a movie gets released on the 'net, look for the watermark, and then go find the person who leaked it, and force them to watch Gigli or From Justin to Kelly over and over with their eyes forced open like in A Clockwork Orange. I imagine movie piracy would decrease by at least 50%, if not more, if the screeners, projectionists, etc were all held responsible. The average joe with a camcorder can't do a TeleSync. Besides, nobody wants to download movies filmed with a camcorder. They're shaky, the cameraman is often eating popcorn or slurping soda, or talking, or whatever.
they can wait until they have developed a safer and cheaper launcher and retire the travesty of engineering unholiness that is the Space Shuttle.
You could have developed a better reusable space vehicle in 1981, could you?
It's not like NASA thinks the shuttle is the only space vehicle we'll ever need. They are working on the shuttle's successor but it takes a lot of time to develop these things. And really, a large number of problems with the shuttle were maintenance issues, not design issues. No matter how great a piece of engineering you have, human error can always break it .
You need to implement it in hardware AND software at the same time for it to be able to "work" (see: DVD Region Codes) and even then it's not really going to work (ibid).
Don't give them ideas. Seriously, envision this:
1) RIAA makes copy-protected CDs that require copy-protected drives.
2) CD-drive manufacturers make drives for the copy-protected CDs.
No problem, right? Who's going to buy those new drives just to play those CDs. But wait, there's more:
3a) RIAA convinces Microsoft to make the next version of Windows only install on drives with the copy protection.
OR
3b) RIAA convinces the major computer manufacturers (Dell, IBM, Compaq/HP, Sony) to include those drives on their machines. (Convincing Sony is not hard, given that they are a record label).
Wait 2 years, and then most of your home consumer market will have these drives. Followed by
4) Profit.
Don't kid yourself - the RIAA is NOT going to die a natural death. They have too many friends in high places, and are in too many people's pockets. Their influence crosses party lines - don't think that voting the "corporation-loving Republicans" out of office will solve this problem. Remember which president passed the DMCA (hint: not Bush).
(I'm not saying you shouldn't vote Bush out, just that you shouldn't expect it to fix this problem)
There's no way people are going to stop buying crap music (unless kids start going from age 6 to age 24, bypassing the teen years completely). And if you won't buy into their DRM schemes, Congress will force you to.
This isn't a completely new idea. Look at cell phones. You can get the phone for free (a crap phone, but it works) and then you pay monthly for the service. Or the budding music/audiobook industry where you get a player (again, a crap player, but it works) for free if you subscribe for a year. (Examples are Napster and Audible, obviously Apple doesn't give a free player if you buy an iTMS account)
I could easily see a future where if you subscribe to Microsoft products for a year, you get a free PC. PCs are dirt cheap anyway.
The question is not whether or not it's possible or feasible. The question is whether Joe Consumer will go for it? There are already a fair number of things that a consumer licenses instead of owning (DRM music, etc). And it works largely because Joe Consumer is ignorant of the details and relies on the companies to tell him why what they're doing is a good idea.
But once it starts leaving the high-tech market and hitting closer to home, there's more pushback. I'll cite everyone's favorite example of DivX (the players, not the codec). Buy a movie but you only get to watch it a set number of times? Yeah, that worked real well. I'm not convinced giving away the players would have fixed that. Disposable self-destructing DVDs crapped out for the same reason, and for environmental reasons. Why? Because people were used to buying DVDs (and, before that, VHS tapes) and owning them, and playing them as many times as they wanted until they broke or the dog ate them, or whatever. And when someone comes along and says "Sorry, you now need to pay to watch this", they say "Um, no."
Consumers have been used to purchasing and owning computers and owning software (yeah, yeah, it's licensed, we know, but so are videotapes technically - 'Licensed for Private Home Viewing' - and we still talking about 'owning' them). So there might be a fair bit of pushback. However, consumers are equally pissed off at their hardware and software becoming obsolete so frequently. So they might just pull this off if it's plugged as the solution to constant upgrading. Time will tell.
as many as 80% of home APs have encryption disabled.
So? I don't have WEP enabled. WEP is not the be-all and end-all. WEP is crap, and introduces horrible cross-platform issues. Not to mention that vendors can't agree on how to specify it - 40 bit vs 56-bit vs 64-bit vs 128-bit - (hint: some of those refer to the same thing).
I have MAC address restriction enabled on my AP. And it works pretty well. Additionally, unknown clients to my DHCP server do not get an address from it. And there's only a/28 routed on the interface my AP is on.
So yes, it's unsafe in that someone can park outside my house, wait until I log on, sniff my MAC address, set his MAC address to that, and get bandwidth. Except that one of my devices will notice, since duplicate MAC addresses on the same segment can cause problems. Not to mention the reception outside my house is crap, so he'd have to park directly in front of my house, and if I notice the traffic indicators on my switch start going nuts, and look outside and see some nerd with a Pringles can, I can go kick his ass.
And the article is short on details. "40% had the defaults configured". What defaults? Passwords? If so, boo CNN for connecting to other people's APs without permission ("The door was unlocked" is not a valid reason for being in someone's house, no matter how stupid you think the homeowner is). If it's SSIDs, that's totally useless. My network name is "default", because I was feeling uninspired when I got my AP. Doesn't mean it's not secure. A friend of mine still has "linksys" for the same reason, yet he has WEP enabled.
California does pass a fair number of insane laws, but they also get it right a fair bit, and this appears to be one of those times. We are one of the few countries in the world that has such a crappy wireless industry. We lag behind the world in standards, and the prices are ridiculous.
I especially like the part about recovery fees. The wireless companies need to be held accountable, and people need to see what they're paying for. It's like Verizon charging $0.44/month for TouchTone service. Either offer it or not, but don't nickel and dime your customers to death.
I hope other states follow California's lead, and then maybe there can be some sanity in the wireless industry.
I don't understand this beta nonsense. Once it's launched, it's launched I'd say. It's fine that Google labels GMail as beta since it's relatively closed at the moment and hasn't had a "proper" launch yet.
I really think it's a support issue. Or perhaps users are still having problems, and they haven't ironed everything out yet. It's a way of saying "Look, we think this is useful for a bunch of people, but we can't say nothing will ever go wrong just yet".
I remember when Google bought the DejaNews archive, and when Google Groups first launched, it was beta, and stayed that way for a long time. And now, if you look the page, it's not beta any more.
I don't think this is some evil plot to keep things in beta - it's just that people are getting more and more impatient.
This is the only way to stem the traffic. People can still run their own mail servers, but all outbound connections should go though the ISP. Afterall, it is not like it is a privacy issue
Who said it was a privacy issue? It's a freedom issue. I often need to send e-mail through other SMTP servers if I'm using my work or school address. Because myisp.com's mail servers will not accept mail from myschool.edu e-mail addresses. And rightly so. If they do, it's called relaying, and we all know relaying is bad.
Comcast has a way (blocking at the modem) to punish the folks who are actually causing the problem. How is it even remotely better to penalize everyone, instead of just the offendors?
All they nned to do is to restrict SMTP outbound connections to their own mailservers. Forcing traffic through their won machines will qucik;ly point out who the abusers are, and they can likewise filter for viruses and worms preventing propogation.
No, they need to do precisely what they were proposing. Block outbound 25 AT THE CABLE MODEM. So it only affects the people causing the problem. And they call up, because they can't send mail, and the technician tells them their machine is 0wnz0red, and they reformat, and it's all good.
Blocking 25 outbound in general will serve to piss of a lot of users who want to send e-mail through their work or school mail servers, but don't feel like using a crappy webmail client. I'm one of those people. Why should I be penalized because some dork is sending spam?
I can't believe it - Comcast has a solution to only punish the offendors, and the Slashdot community wants them to punish everyone.
Is it a bad idea to rely so heavily upon one service for our major internet needs?
I love how the first reaction when something goes wrong is to replace it, or introduce competiton, or whatever. Yes, there are plenty of times when a service needs competition to encourage it to suck less. But go find me another company that is even remotely prepared to do DNS load-balancing. Verisign? Oh, that's a great idea. Going to start one yourself? Let us know when you have the infrastructure.
The fact is, we have NO idea what caused this. There's no link to any story anywhere - just one reader report. It could be Akamai's fault. It could be their upstream providers. It could be failures elsewhere in the Internet. Could be someone uploaded a bad zone file. Or maybe some over-zealous backhoe operator slashed some fiber somewhere.
It's probably best to reserve judgement until you have all the facts. (And if you're about to hit the reply button, yes, I'd say the exact same thing if MSFT lost their DNS service).
actually michael moore has requested that people question everything - including what he says.
Good, finally someone else who understands this. The first Michael Moore film I saw was Roger and Me, in a Contemporary Issues class in HS (yes, it sounds like a blow-off class, but believe me six 5-7 page papers per semester is not blow-off). The teacher told us not to take the film at face value, but rather to write down questions we had during it, and then do some research and answer our own questions.
People are confusing documentaries and nature films. Of course a documentary has an agenda - it has to, it's primarily an answer to a question the filmmaker has. The director is not going to spend millions of dollars to prove himself wrong.
If anyone takes his films as fact, they're stupid. His films (and documentaries in general) are designed to make you think. You have to approach them with an open mind, but not an impressionable one. Bowling for Columbine did not make me think "My god, the gun industry is evil and Charlton Heston should be put to sleep". It instead raised questions (not the least of which was "Was Moore fair in his filmmaking?"). I then went and did some reading afterwards, and formed my own views on the gun situation in America. And I expect Fahrenheit 911 (assuming I ever get to see it) will do the same.
You cannot hope to understand an issue unless you look at both sides, and then form your own opinion for yourself. Go to see his movies to be entertained (entertainment != comedy, remember - I'm not saying gun control or 9/11 were funny) and to have your views challenged and to raise questions of your own. Do not go to see them to get told what to believe.
This happened to me and another support person just the other day. A user calls, reporting an "F User Error" on the workstation in their cluster. No such error exists, of course. The plot thickens when they say it's being displayed on all workstations in the cluster. This raises further doubts about the user's sanity, given that half these machines are running Solaris, and the other half Linux. Finally, after language barrier issues (English was not the caller's first language), it's tracked down to a printer error that's showing up on all the workstations. That's even more confusing, since printers have a limited number of error messages they display. Finally, I think, ok, I'll check the printer status, and that's when we discover what the user was really trying to say:
displayBufferText="50.1 FUSER ERROR"
And the case is finally solved by requesting a replacement fuser unit for the printer.
One time I called Redhat for tech support in getting a RH to run on a laptop. I was told, "LCD's don't have scan rates and frequency settings like CRT's do."
I almost went through the phone to choke the bastard.
Uh, only problem is, he was mostly right. While LCDs do in fact have scan rates and frequency settings, no one cares, since they're mostly fixed. Almost all LCDs (at least in the home user market) have a 60 Hz vertical refresh rate. And most LCDs have a fixed resolution, so the scan rate is fixed (it is derived from vertical refresh and resolution). So he mostly knew what he was talking about, assuming the question was "How do I configure XFree86".
Now, if the question was "Can I install Linux on a laptop?" and the answer was "No, because LCDs don't have scan rates", then that's pretty stupid. But that's not clear from the post. Also, how long ago was this? It wasn't that long ago that Linux on a laptop required a lot of kludging, especially to get X running.
Why is that special in the eyes of the law? (seriously - the blurb does not make it clear) Attorney-client confidentiality, sure. Medical professional confidentiality, fine. Developer-packager confidentiality? I don't think so. Unless these are confidential for some other reason. Stamping "confidential" on it, doesn't make it confidential. That's kind of the point of subpoenas.
Slashdot Mirror
The article is full of shit. iPods will play WAV, AIFF, MP3, and unprotected AAC. In fact, that's all the played for the few years before the ITunes Music Store came into business. CNN is just plain wrong, and they're making it sound like Real did Apple a favor.
Or with my rights at all for that matter. I don't have a right to not pay attention to the road. I don't have a right to be distracted while driving. And I certainly don't have a right to any form of entertainment I choose while driving?
He was distracted in his car and crossed the double yellow line. End of story.
Until it's used as a bot to distribute kiddie porn, and the FBI comes and knocks on your door and they throw you in jail for 50 years. Yes, yes, death is irreversible, whereas you can always get acquitted later, but it comes pretty darn close to ruining your life.
My point exactly. No one uses PHP, and all because of this license. If only they used the GPL, they might get some users, and get some O'Reilly books written about them and...
*whispering off camera*
Oh.
Seriously, the biggest reason I don't use PHP is because I learned Perl first, and PHP still feels like a kludge. But other people love it because it's easy. Seems to me that these are deciding factors, not licensing.
The what what? Oh, you mean the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority.
And this is old news. Those of us in Boston have been dealing with the implications of this for months now. From cameras, to random "Papers, please!" ID checks on the subway, or not carrying anything larger than a loaf of bread on the Orange Line during the convention, to closing an entire Interstate highway from 4PM until late in the evening for an entire week.
Nothing special about these cameras. There's no face recognition software, there's no "do not walk on sidewalk" list. Nothing to see here folks.
I recently had Comcast shut down my port 25 access due to spam reports. Of course, they refused to tell me who reported me or what they reported, so even giving them logs of my outgoing port 25 access from a sniffer isn't enough for them to remove the mark from my record.
And for starters, we could use some legislation requiring cable companies to treat all customers equally, regardless of how much they're paying. If you have a business account for cable modem service, they'll forward you reports of spam or other abuses (ie: port scanning from your machine), and they'll bend over backwards to help you, and if you say "there is no way this is my machine", they'll actually accept it on the first try and push the complainant to give more details or more proof.
(yes, I know legislation for that will never work, but it's most unfortunate that end users can get screwed more easily just because they're paying less. I mean, the power company won't ignore your report of a blackout just because you don't keep your lights and A/C on 24 hours a day)
Not anymore. *insert joke about server being hosted via wireless link* *insert joke about african vs european swallows and their airspeed velocity using IP over avian carrier*
You're kidding, right? At least for 0.5 and 0.6, Thunderbird had serious IMAP/SSL bugs, where it would just hang for no apparent reason. The release notes acknowledge this bug, even. This caused a problem not just with delays in INBOX operations, but also manifested itself as a problmem with sending. If you chose to save sent mail on the server, and clicked Send, and it sent the mail, and then hung trying to write it to the server, it would respond with "mail was not sent" when it clearly was, it just hadn't copied it. Even the old Netscape 4.x was able to say "Sending the mail was successful, but copying it to your Sent folder failed". I never understand why Mozilla/Thunderbird couldn't do that.
I haven't compared against 0.7 yet, but last I checked Mail.app was an exceptionally good IMAP client, and even pine was better than Thunderbird at IMAP/SSL.
Getting 1000mB's of space is just a side effect, that's there because gmail makes it desirable to archive multiple entire mailing lists.
Yahoo, once upon a time, was also search engine. (Yes, yes, it was called the Yahoo directory, but it did eventually do crawling) And a pretty good one, too. (I'm talking back when it was still a Stanford project, like another search engine) It's not inconceivable they had a project like this on the back burner that's getting ramped up to compete with Google. Granted, I don't think they have a chance, just because of the way Google works, their strong desire for simplicity, and the desire to keep the ads out of the search results.
What's most notable, however, is that Yahoo is doing this right now. And we don't even have a firm release date for Gmail. It's still in beta. If Yahoo is already scared of a beta service, that's saying something.
I get the feeling Apple designed it as a wireless AP that can serve audio or share a USB printer, whichever the users want, rather than as a device for people who have a printer next to their stereo.
No, it sounds terrible. Like those CDs that had high-pitched audio to prevent copying, and ended up eating people's speakers.
They claim they got the inspiration by noticing that computer monitors and TVs film poorly and have lines progressing down the screen (because the camera is filming faster than the screen can refresh, and is catching it in mid-frame. The image on your screen is being redrawn 60-85 times per second, depending on what your refresh rate is.) Except I know several people who experience physical pain given a low-enough refresh rate. Even 60-65 Hz can make them cringe. If they're introducing artifacts at regular intervals into a movie, I could easily imagine this affecting a whole bunch of people who would then be unable to attend movies. That would be poor. (Though pissing off your audience seems to work for the RIAA, so who knows?)
Really, it would be a lot less effort to start smaller. All pre-release copies of a movie (maybe even all prints, but then 1-to-1 mappings become harder) should get their own watermark. Something small, that's only in a few frames, like a cue dot. Barely noticeable unless you're looking for it. And then when a movie gets released on the 'net, look for the watermark, and then go find the person who leaked it, and force them to watch Gigli or From Justin to Kelly over and over with their eyes forced open like in A Clockwork Orange. I imagine movie piracy would decrease by at least 50%, if not more, if the screeners, projectionists, etc were all held responsible. The average joe with a camcorder can't do a TeleSync. Besides, nobody wants to download movies filmed with a camcorder. They're shaky, the cameraman is often eating popcorn or slurping soda, or talking, or whatever.
You could have developed a better reusable space vehicle in 1981, could you?
It's not like NASA thinks the shuttle is the only space vehicle we'll ever need. They are working on the shuttle's successor but it takes a lot of time to develop these things. And really, a large number of problems with the shuttle were maintenance issues, not design issues. No matter how great a piece of engineering you have, human error can always break it .
Don't give them ideas. Seriously, envision this:
1) RIAA makes copy-protected CDs that require copy-protected drives.
2) CD-drive manufacturers make drives for the copy-protected CDs.
No problem, right? Who's going to buy those new drives just to play those CDs. But wait, there's more:
3a) RIAA convinces Microsoft to make the next version of Windows only install on drives with the copy protection.
OR
3b) RIAA convinces the major computer manufacturers (Dell, IBM, Compaq/HP, Sony) to include those drives on their machines. (Convincing Sony is not hard, given that they are a record label).
Wait 2 years, and then most of your home consumer market will have these drives. Followed by
4) Profit.
Don't kid yourself - the RIAA is NOT going to die a natural death. They have too many friends in high places, and are in too many people's pockets. Their influence crosses party lines - don't think that voting the "corporation-loving Republicans" out of office will solve this problem. Remember which president passed the DMCA (hint: not Bush).
(I'm not saying you shouldn't vote Bush out, just that you shouldn't expect it to fix this problem)
There's no way people are going to stop buying crap music (unless kids start going from age 6 to age 24, bypassing the teen years completely). And if you won't buy into their DRM schemes, Congress will force you to.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I could easily see a future where if you subscribe to Microsoft products for a year, you get a free PC. PCs are dirt cheap anyway.
The question is not whether or not it's possible or feasible. The question is whether Joe Consumer will go for it? There are already a fair number of things that a consumer licenses instead of owning (DRM music, etc). And it works largely because Joe Consumer is ignorant of the details and relies on the companies to tell him why what they're doing is a good idea.
But once it starts leaving the high-tech market and hitting closer to home, there's more pushback. I'll cite everyone's favorite example of DivX (the players, not the codec). Buy a movie but you only get to watch it a set number of times? Yeah, that worked real well. I'm not convinced giving away the players would have fixed that. Disposable self-destructing DVDs crapped out for the same reason, and for environmental reasons. Why? Because people were used to buying DVDs (and, before that, VHS tapes) and owning them, and playing them as many times as they wanted until they broke or the dog ate them, or whatever. And when someone comes along and says "Sorry, you now need to pay to watch this", they say "Um, no."
Consumers have been used to purchasing and owning computers and owning software (yeah, yeah, it's licensed, we know, but so are videotapes technically - 'Licensed for Private Home Viewing' - and we still talking about 'owning' them). So there might be a fair bit of pushback. However, consumers are equally pissed off at their hardware and software becoming obsolete so frequently. So they might just pull this off if it's plugged as the solution to constant upgrading. Time will tell.
So? I don't have WEP enabled. WEP is not the be-all and end-all. WEP is crap, and introduces horrible cross-platform issues. Not to mention that vendors can't agree on how to specify it - 40 bit vs 56-bit vs 64-bit vs 128-bit - (hint: some of those refer to the same thing).
I have MAC address restriction enabled on my AP. And it works pretty well. Additionally, unknown clients to my DHCP server do not get an address from it. And there's only a /28 routed on the interface my AP is on.
So yes, it's unsafe in that someone can park outside my house, wait until I log on, sniff my MAC address, set his MAC address to that, and get bandwidth. Except that one of my devices will notice, since duplicate MAC addresses on the same segment can cause problems. Not to mention the reception outside my house is crap, so he'd have to park directly in front of my house, and if I notice the traffic indicators on my switch start going nuts, and look outside and see some nerd with a Pringles can, I can go kick his ass.
And the article is short on details. "40% had the defaults configured". What defaults? Passwords? If so, boo CNN for connecting to other people's APs without permission ("The door was unlocked" is not a valid reason for being in someone's house, no matter how stupid you think the homeowner is). If it's SSIDs, that's totally useless. My network name is "default", because I was feeling uninspired when I got my AP. Doesn't mean it's not secure. A friend of mine still has "linksys" for the same reason, yet he has WEP enabled.
I especially like the part about recovery fees. The wireless companies need to be held accountable, and people need to see what they're paying for. It's like Verizon charging $0.44/month for TouchTone service. Either offer it or not, but don't nickel and dime your customers to death.
I hope other states follow California's lead, and then maybe there can be some sanity in the wireless industry.
I really think it's a support issue. Or perhaps users are still having problems, and they haven't ironed everything out yet. It's a way of saying "Look, we think this is useful for a bunch of people, but we can't say nothing will ever go wrong just yet".
I remember when Google bought the DejaNews archive, and when Google Groups first launched, it was beta, and stayed that way for a long time. And now, if you look the page, it's not beta any more.
I don't think this is some evil plot to keep things in beta - it's just that people are getting more and more impatient.
Who said it was a privacy issue? It's a freedom issue. I often need to send e-mail through other SMTP servers if I'm using my work or school address. Because myisp.com's mail servers will not accept mail from myschool.edu e-mail addresses. And rightly so. If they do, it's called relaying, and we all know relaying is bad.
Comcast has a way (blocking at the modem) to punish the folks who are actually causing the problem. How is it even remotely better to penalize everyone, instead of just the offendors?
No, they need to do precisely what they were proposing. Block outbound 25 AT THE CABLE MODEM. So it only affects the people causing the problem. And they call up, because they can't send mail, and the technician tells them their machine is 0wnz0red, and they reformat, and it's all good.
Blocking 25 outbound in general will serve to piss of a lot of users who want to send e-mail through their work or school mail servers, but don't feel like using a crappy webmail client. I'm one of those people. Why should I be penalized because some dork is sending spam?
I can't believe it - Comcast has a solution to only punish the offendors, and the Slashdot community wants them to punish everyone.
I love how the first reaction when something goes wrong is to replace it, or introduce competiton, or whatever. Yes, there are plenty of times when a service needs competition to encourage it to suck less. But go find me another company that is even remotely prepared to do DNS load-balancing. Verisign? Oh, that's a great idea. Going to start one yourself? Let us know when you have the infrastructure.
The fact is, we have NO idea what caused this. There's no link to any story anywhere - just one reader report. It could be Akamai's fault. It could be their upstream providers. It could be failures elsewhere in the Internet. Could be someone uploaded a bad zone file. Or maybe some over-zealous backhoe operator slashed some fiber somewhere.
It's probably best to reserve judgement until you have all the facts. (And if you're about to hit the reply button, yes, I'd say the exact same thing if MSFT lost their DNS service).
Good, finally someone else who understands this. The first Michael Moore film I saw was Roger and Me, in a Contemporary Issues class in HS (yes, it sounds like a blow-off class, but believe me six 5-7 page papers per semester is not blow-off). The teacher told us not to take the film at face value, but rather to write down questions we had during it, and then do some research and answer our own questions.
People are confusing documentaries and nature films. Of course a documentary has an agenda - it has to, it's primarily an answer to a question the filmmaker has. The director is not going to spend millions of dollars to prove himself wrong.
If anyone takes his films as fact, they're stupid. His films (and documentaries in general) are designed to make you think. You have to approach them with an open mind, but not an impressionable one. Bowling for Columbine did not make me think "My god, the gun industry is evil and Charlton Heston should be put to sleep". It instead raised questions (not the least of which was "Was Moore fair in his filmmaking?"). I then went and did some reading afterwards, and formed my own views on the gun situation in America. And I expect Fahrenheit 911 (assuming I ever get to see it) will do the same.
You cannot hope to understand an issue unless you look at both sides, and then form your own opinion for yourself. Go to see his movies to be entertained (entertainment != comedy, remember - I'm not saying gun control or 9/11 were funny) and to have your views challenged and to raise questions of your own. Do not go to see them to get told what to believe.
Ombudsman has its roots in Swedish, where it literally means "commission man", or something like that. But yes, it still sounds like a made-up word.
(Hi Jen, if you're reading this)
I almost went through the phone to choke the bastard.
Uh, only problem is, he was mostly right. While LCDs do in fact have scan rates and frequency settings, no one cares, since they're mostly fixed. Almost all LCDs (at least in the home user market) have a 60 Hz vertical refresh rate. And most LCDs have a fixed resolution, so the scan rate is fixed (it is derived from vertical refresh and resolution). So he mostly knew what he was talking about, assuming the question was "How do I configure XFree86".
Now, if the question was "Can I install Linux on a laptop?" and the answer was "No, because LCDs don't have scan rates", then that's pretty stupid. But that's not clear from the post. Also, how long ago was this? It wasn't that long ago that Linux on a laptop required a lot of kludging, especially to get X running.
Why is that special in the eyes of the law? (seriously - the blurb does not make it clear) Attorney-client confidentiality, sure. Medical professional confidentiality, fine. Developer-packager confidentiality? I don't think so. Unless these are confidential for some other reason. Stamping "confidential" on it, doesn't make it confidential. That's kind of the point of subpoenas.
Or am I missing something?